Power out: "The Voice of Hind Rajab"

The Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania broke through via the festival circuit with her 2023 feature Four Daughters, a drama-documentary hybrid that sought to give a fuller picture of the circumstances whereby two young women were inspired to flee their family home and run off with ISIS. Glowing reports from first responders helped land it a theatrical run, where this viewer was mostly struck by the film's determination to tie itself and the viewer up in knots: it wasn't by any definition pure documentary, but neither did it make for especially satisfying fiction. (It did, in its roundabout fashion, get to some understanding of the muddle the world and its people are in nowadays.) In longshot, The Voice of Hind Rajab appears exactly the kind of commercially-minded consolidation emergent arthouse directors are now expected to make second time around. In its form, this is a command-room procedural drama-slash-thriller, with the call-centre operatives of the Palestinian Red Crescent's West Bank station racing against time to rescue a six-year-old girl trapped in a car that now contains the bodies of her just-deceased aunt, uncle and cousins, having been pinned down at a gas station by Israeli tank fire. There is, however, a formal complication that carries us back in the direction of Four Daughters: the cries for help we hear coming through the phone jockeys' headsets are those of the actual Hind Rajab, a real-life six-year-old who here serves as a representative of the estimated 20,000 children killed by Israeli forces in the march to reduce Gaza to rubble and then a Trump-endorsed holiday and tourism resort. Ben Hania obtained permission from Hind's mother to repurpose the call, and now - as that title indicates - the voice of Hind Rajab has been given renewed prominence over everything else around it; the now Oscar-nominated movie that bears this name, produced by Brad Pitt's Plan B shingle, is a loudhailer upgrade of the call centre's speaker systems, constructed to carry these particular cries and wails around the globe in extra-thumping, extra-damning Dolby surround.

It is, then, a tricky one to have to assess, think and write about: a film that is, in some essential respect, inseparable from a cause. The sense the usual rules of cinematic engagement don't apply is only heightened by the fact that, on its current UK release, The Voice of Hind Rajab is being preceded by a prerecorded message from Ben Hania herself, on the set of her next project, apologising for not being with us in person (were we expecting her?), thanking us for coming to see the film, and urging us to tell our friends and loved ones about it - an intervention that risks coming across as either special pleading or directorial insecurity that the film won't entirely speak for itself. (The last time we got an intro like this it was Spielberg ahead of The Fabelmans, apparently stricken by uncertainty around releasing a personal project in the aftermath of Covid.) In fact, Voice does succeed in carrying and projecting a certain amount of critical information. The film's procedural drama makes a point of how hard it was to get into and out of the Gaza of January 2024, and how hard it was for Gazans to communicate with the outside world. The initial call comes from a relative in Germany, alerting the Red Crescent to a possible tragedy in their midst; when they make contact with Hind, the line's prone to dropping out and not great at the best of times, because the Israeli army have jammed comms to some degree; and dispatching an ambulance proves a challenge in itself, given that the Red Crescent required Israeli clearance to proceed, and their drivers were navigating streets bombed beyond all previous recognition. Any urgency is further stymied by the need to nudge requests up the chain of command: here, Ben Hania begins to recreate within this humdrum office space the kind of asymmetrical warfare going on outside, pitting heroes who feel obliged to do the right thing - to follow the rulebook - against an enemy busy killing without compunction. The call-centre workers are in some way surrogates for those of us in the audience: they're hearing what we're hearing, trying to piece this situation together; they, too, are at a potentially fatal remove from the action; they too react with horror and tears. In the meantime, all they can do is discuss among themselves, and here again Voice circles back to the perilously talky Four Daughters.

To some extent, what we're being asked to review here isn't a film or a story, rather a tape. The tape is important, in that it holds both proof of life and evidence of possible, prosecutable war crimes; so long as it keeps running, we know Hind Rajab is still alive. But a transcript isn't a script, and here's where one might begin to question some of Ben Hania's methods and choices. The Red Crescent workers have time to talk, such was the on-the-ground impasse of Gaza at this point, yet once the initial scene-setting info has been obtained, there's very little more that the protagonists can say. They can keep Hind talking, which is proof of some humanity; they can ask her to describe developments (thereby putting images in our head that this largely deskbound film cannot show), say a prayer and carry out breathing exercises. But they can't, ultimately, keep her from harm; the satisfying progression of the command-room drama is here replaced by gridlock, snafu and circumlocution, recasting characters who'd conventionally be can-do heroes as passive, can't-do eavesdroppers. More problematic is how Ben Hania confirms our standing as mere observers. At the film's climax, one aid worker's hand is seen to puncture the frame, clutching cellphone footage of the scene in the actual call centre on January 29, 2024. I think it's been put there to underline the verisimilitude of Ben Hania's re-enactment - it's the pixellated equivalent of those photos she inserts in the closing credits to highlight the real aid workers - but as has so often been the case during this conflict, we're really just left looking at a phone and frowning. Voice is a simpler undertaking than Four Daughters: if you can't conceive of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza, Ben Hania proposes, here's one life, held in the balance over ninety minutes. And if you need your cinema to make you feel something for it to be considered successful, Voice is inarguably that. The primary feeling it instilled in me, however, was a very familiar powerlessness. Whether it was consoling invention or not, the hijacked passengers of Paul Greengrass's United 93 finally got to fight back against those who'd been terrorising them. The question Ben Hania's film trails in its wake is altogether more troubling, not to mention doomerist: if committed professionals not an hour away from the scene with connections coming out of their ears couldn't do anything to halt the Israeli war machine as it bore down on a defenceless innocent, what hope do you or I have?

The Voice of Hind Rajab is now showing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of January 16-18, 2025):

1 (new) 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18) ****

2 (1) The Housemaid (15)

3 (2) Hamnet (12A) **

4 (3) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12A) ***

5 (4) Marty Supreme (15) ***

6 (5) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

7 (new) Rental Family (12A)

8 (new) The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (12A)

9 (6) The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants (PG) ***

10 (7) Anaconda (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

2. The Voice of Hind Rajab

3. Labyrinth

4. Happy Feet

5. Marty Supreme

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Wicked: For Good (PG)

2 (new) The Running Man (15) **

3 (2) Predator: Badlands (12) **

4 (5) 28 Years Later (15) ****

5 (40) Tron: Ares (12)

6 (4) Dracula (15)

7 (9) Jurassic World: Rebirth (12) **

8 (3) Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (15)

9 (16) One Battle After Another (15) ****

10 (10) Sinners (15) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. One Battle After Another

2. Roofman

3. Sketch

4. Cloud

5. The Smashing Machine

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Carlito's Way [above] (Sunday, Channel 4, 11.55pm)

2. The Magnificent Seven (Saturday, BBC Two, 6.30pm)

3. The Zone of Interest (Saturday, Channel 4, 9.45pm)

4. Get Out (Friday, BBC One, 12.50am)

5. Defiance (Tuesday, BBC Two, 11pm)

On DVD: "Sketch"

Sketch is a cheering rarity: an original family film with real comic smarts, recalling the sundappled subversion of early Tim Burton and Joe Dante. (A more contemporary way of positioning it: as A Minecraft Movie with less money and more attitude.) Curiously, it's brought to us by Angel Studios, the evangelical Christian-aligned institution that previously gave the world the MAGA-targeting Sound of Freedom. Square that circle, if you can. (Does anything make sense on this planet any more?) Granted, the film centres on a Caucasian family unit, but it's a rather sorry, lopsided one, with sadsack single dad Tony Hale presiding over two maladjusted children: a daughter (Bianca Belle) whose quiet rage and self-reproach after the loss of her mother manifests in her incessant drawing, and a smart-ass son (Kue Lawrence) who's discovered an apparently magic lake and hit upon a crackpot plan to revive mom by dumping her ashes in it. Clearly, there are some issues here, and they redouble after the daughter's notebook - and not the urn with the ashes - gets tossed in the water, bringing a clutch of crudely drawn monsters and demons, manifestations of a troubled psyche, to towering and terrifying life. Parents and guardians note: it's a 12A.

It's also an example of a writer-director (Seth Worley, taking a giant leap forwards and a bow after a decade's worth of shorts) doing more with less: his modest resources have been well-channelled and maximised, and he arrives at a genuinely happy and fruitful marriage between the analogue and the digital. Sketch once more illustrates it's better to have a small number of VFX shots done well than a screenfilling splurge that clutters the eyeline and saps the technicians' time, resources and spirits. These monsters - being kids' drawings - aren't meant to look like much; what's most pleasing about them are the waxy smears and chalk dust they leave behind, the handiwork of a visually-minded director doodling over his own live-action footage (and perhaps of a parent who's had to clear up after especially prolific scribblers). Some penhand or human touch, in other words, persists. The casting, for one, is fab: from the off, the juvenile leads have an air of brattishness that persuades you they might well get up to no good (and makes you wonder anew how this project found favour with its Sunday-schooling studio). The grown-ups are no less memorable: Hale lands easily his most substantial role this side of Buster Bluth, legitimately weary as someone who finds this parenting lark hard, doubly so now that he's lost a life partner who had a far easier connection to their offspring, and the ever-welcome D'Arcy Carden is fun as his realtor sister, trying to smarten up and sell the family home while the plot grows ever more chaotic and unruly. Worley's own editing assists in that sense of a world veering out of control, while also keeping the film 92 minutes tight and redirecting our eyes towards some nice, Spielbergian detail. When the monsters crash the children's schoolbus in a cornfield, Worley inserts a shot of the guilty pencils, loosed from a dropped backpack; the finale hinges on our heroine having to find a felt-tip pen that actually works. Sketch has come out of nowhere and from an unlikely source - not least because the narrative resolutions it proposes are finally more psychoanalytical than pious - but if this doesn't land Worley a major studio gig in the next few years, I'll eat my Crayola. Just don't make him remake Disney cartoons with real people, that's all one asks.

Sketch is available on DVD through Spirit Entertainment, and to rent via Prime Video and YouTube.

On demand: "Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa"

1993's Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa was Shah Rukh Khan - poised on the brink of superstardom, two years before Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge - in one of his favourite roles. His boyish dreamer Sunil doesn't know much about biology, geology or algebra - to all outward appearances, indeed, he's a scholastic failure - largely because he prefers to spend his days and nights as the trumpeter in a band, bringing to the rehearsal room more enthusiasm than experience or expertise. What he does know is that he's crazy about local sweetheart Anna (Suchitra Krishnamoorthi), the band's singer. Anna, alas, only has eyes for Sunil's close friend, uptown boy Chris (Deepak Tijori), leaving Sunil to blow his own trumpet. (It's never easy being a young man with a horn.) So our boy takes it upon himself to sabotage his bandmates' romance, a state of affairs that results in him a) breaking his beloved's heart and b) being kicked out of said band. (Deservedly, you might conclude.) Khan was soon to become one of the all-time great heroes of the Indian cinema - action, comedy, romance, countering the country's sporadic lapses into Islamophobia: truly, he could do it all - but he began his acting career playing villains of various stripes; Sunil, in this context, really does seem like a pivotal or transitional role, flushing out the last few drops of the rogue and bastard in this performer so that he could get on with charming everybody's pants off.

Co-writer/director Kundan Shah wisely treats this cartoonish tale of puppy love as something that shouldn't be approached too seriously: the early rehearsal scenes - terrorising the eye with wall-to-wall neon leisurewear - emit a strong Saved by the Bell energy. The film has comic smarts, though; weeks on from seeing it, its ideas are still making me laugh. A paying nightclub crowd found in a constant state of outrage at the terrible bands set before them; the diabetic dad going to absurd lengths to get his hands on a slice of cake; the world's most empathetic gangboss and his enforcer, for some reason modelled on Stevie Wonder circa 1982. There is in here a vivid flashback to those American teen movies that had preceded it, and - more specifically yet - something approaching the borderline unhinged vision "Savage" Steve Holland arrived at in doodling all over 1985's Better Off Dead.... (As in many of those US teenpics, you'll need to look past these kids' ages, and the fact one of them actually looks older than their own onscreen father.) Mostly, there is SRK as the image of restless youth: sometimes wrongheaded, always goodhearted, he runs, jumps and clambers all over these Goa locations, performs his own stunts, and does his very best to conquer some small corner of a world that would soon be his entirely. The direction of career travel becomes most obvious during a finale that gathers the cast, representing the village it's taken to raise the often wayward child Sunil, to pay fulsome tribute to the dude we've just spent two-and-a-half hours watching ("He is unique, one in a thousand"). If ever you wanted to know why India is so fond of this star - and so forgiving of its eldest sons' character flaws - this would be a most enjoyable place to start.

Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa is now streaming on Netflix.

On demand: "Hedda Gabler"

Compared to Nia DaCosta's recent, ultra-modern rethink Hedda, Hedda Gabler - a live television filming of 1962, revived on BBC Four last weekend as part of the broadcaster's winter Ibsen season - is likely to strike contemporary viewers as very much of the old school. It benefits from several masterstrokes at the casting stage, revealed once we set foot inside the palatial marital home newly occupied by mollified historian Michael Redgrave (cosy, beardy, almost fatally English) and Ingrid Bergman (worldly, knowing, icy-to-severe). This union is plainly doomed from the off, even before ghosts of Hedda's past - notably her former (and apparently unforgettable) lover Ejlert Løvborg (Trevor Howard) - drift into shot. Bergman and Howard, the disillusioned gal from Casablanca and a rougher-edged variant of the doctor from Brief Encounter: this, surely, is a more plausible match. There follows just over an hour of social calls - first a flirty Ralph Richardson as the Judge, then Howard, then the undertakers and the man with the broom - in which the usual niceties and rules of decorum are scrubbed away. The staff we see in the opening scene knock off early, leaving these posh nobs to thrash and shoot it out between them. In a way Ibsen would surely have approved, soon it's every man and woman for themselves. 

The production, by contrast, is more harmonious, uniting those mid-century telly principles of good writing, good playing and good direction. Phil Reisman's abridged text gets in the guts of this play and slowly winds its intestines around the characters' necks, while Alex Segal's direction is notable for its skilful darkening of tone: this is cosy Sunday night viewing, up until the point it very definitely isn't. Redgrave and Howard, by this moment reliable old hands, etch contrasting ideas of masculinity, one weak and dithering, the other brutally cruel, although both finally come to bow before their female co-star. Though she can't entirely sell us on the madness typically drawn out over a long night in the theatre (all the business about "vine leaves in his hair" sounds like either an especially weird fetish or mere mistranslation), a flighty and restless Bergman appears to foresee a world where Hedda might be reclaimed and redeemed as the stage's first polysexual, penned in at every turn by dullards and tchotchkes. The judge's description of this affair as "a triangular friendship" now seems a winking sign of how the television of the early 1960s was just beginning to loosen up, but everything else here is recognisably - and positively - Reithian: a relic of the days when broadcast TV still seemed to set some stock in culture, and determined to make even those plays with forbidding reputations accessible to all.

Hedda Gabler is now streaming via the BBC iPlayer.

On demand: "The Adversary/Pratidwandi"

1970's The Adversary is Satyajit Ray, post-1968, pulling his cinema into a new decade and a new shape, with the help of a Sunil Ganguly novel. Gone, for the most part, are the mythopoetic images of rural life, replaced by something harder and more direct: handheld dispatches from the sprawling, crowded, neon-lit city that suggest this filmmaker had been spending his time at international festivals checking out the latest Godard or New Hollywood offerings. Narratively, it chimes with the same year's Five Easy Pieces, centring as it does on an educated but unemployed and thereby ever more frustrated drifter looking askance at polite society, this time from the margins of Calcutta. Dhritiman Chatterjee's Siddhartha Chaudhary is a med-school dropout introduced blowing his latest job interview by bringing up his support for Vietnamese resistance fighters. He tries to take refuge from this unsparing world in a cinema, only for an unexplained explosion nearby to send him stumbling back out onto the streets; a brief spell in the shade is interrupted by the pie-eyed pieties of passing Western hippies; and when he ventures in the direction of a pal's film club to catch the latest Swedish import ("no cuts", the pal somewhat lasciviously promises), he's dismayed to have to sit through a dreary drama offering no nudity whatsoever. At which point, the overall picture becomes clear: this is Ray, then pushing fifty, making his own show of sympathy for a younger generation who - for one reason or another, and occasionally through their own making - can't get any satisfaction whatsoever.

The impoverished Apu, so attentively studied and nimbly described in the course of this director's earlier, breakthrough trilogy, had been scrabbling to get anywhere in this India; here, even the scions of the country's middle-classes are shown to be disenfranchised, leaving Siddhartha (whose princely name sounds more than vaguely ironic) with too much time on his hands and not nearly enough money in his pocket. So he flounders and fantasises in the established Billy Liar! style, and talks nonsense with his mates, as twentysomething men everywhere are prone to do; he hatches a crackpot (and ultimately doomed) plan to resolve an awkward situation involving his sister and her employer; and, upon being reminded of a Che Guevara biography in his possession, he himself makes timid efforts to bring about a revolution that - albeit in a roundabout and not entirely effective fashion - comes to pass before the closing freeze-frame. By this point, Ray had the confidence to allow a film to flow from one telling anecdote to the next, and if there's an obvious limitation here (Siddhartha isn't the kind of character to whom especially dramatic events occur), the advantage is that this protagonist covers a lot of ground in the course of his peregrinations. Gradually - scene by scene and scheme by scheme - The Adversary builds quite the detailed picture of what life must have been like for Calcutta's comfortable yet undermotivated kids at the turn of the Seventies. Along the way, Ray's steady naturalism is expanded via expressionist flourishes: inserts pointing up a sometime med student's anatomical worldview, negative images of moments imprinted on the protagonist's subconscious, the heightened ticking of a clock that in passing positions Siddhartha as a shuffling human timebomb. Given the breathless crosspollination going on in Seventies cinema, you have to wonder whether either Scorsese or Schrader saw it before starting out on Taxi Driver, but The Adversary also seems to predict an entire strain of indie cinema centred on outcasts, refuseniks and slackers who come to learn - in a roundabout fashion, adjacent to the hard way - that the best course of action they can take for their own peace of mind is, finally, to burn your bridges and get the hell out of Dodge.

The Adversary is now streaming via YouTube.

Carry on, Doctor: "28 Years Later: The Bone Temple"

Last June's 28 Years Later was probably as close to a stealth event movie as the current marketplace could allow. Few cinemagoers would have entered with elevated expectations, given the near two-decade gap that followed 2007's 28 Weeks Later, yet director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland collectively pushed further than anticipated, both in their parable of parenting in a country beset by monsters and in an ending that very much went there. Feathers were ruffled; jaws dropped. Was this Garland the edgelord-adjacent sometime gamer broaching a taboo subject for lolz and attention, or merely the first phase in a more considered reappropriation of recent British popular culture? Just by floating that question, the creatives involved have raised expectation levels around the sequel: if you're anything like this viewer, you'll want to know how 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple - shot back-to-back with the first film, this time with Nia DaCosta (of the Candyman reboot and last year's Hedda) behind the camera - intends to handle this potential hospital pass, with its vague whiff of bad taste. Certainly those monsters are still in play as the new film begins, and by monsters I mean both the Jimmies, the tracksuit-clad, bewigged gang our teenage hero Spike (Alfie Williams) fell in with at the end of film one, and the franchise's ever-enraged zombies, begrimed representatives of a civilisation stripped bare and reduced to the old primal urges. Yet Garland and DaCosta also set out on a search for renewed humanity here, what Ralph Fiennes' former NHS doctor Ian Kelson - more prominent this time around, bringing out the dead while simultaneously trying to tame the zombie hordes - frames as "peace and respite". God, do you remember those?

Both formally and ideologically, this is a simpler film than its predecessor, made up of two strands that intersect in a final showdown between something like good and something like evil. Whenever matters get too intense around the Jimmies - led by Jack O'Connell's Lord Sir Jimmy Crystal on a plundering rampage through the English countryside - DaCosta and Garland can always cut away to the dutiful Kelson and his pet project. The tactic may just win back those who felt Boyle's film, with its staccato camera trickery and headspinning soundtrack cues, was all a bit too much. (By contrast, we know exactly where we are with DaCosta's needledrops: Duran Duran, Radiohead, Iron Maiden, plus a final cue setting up a further film that may serve as a homecoming of sorts.) Humanity, however, demands we embrace the eccentric and idiosyncratic, and DaCosta's remit has clearly been to not just protect and sustain but expand upon this series' warped mythos. So we get the usual zombie attacks, decapitations and eviscerations; the surviving humans are becoming fewer and farther between film by film, numerically limiting possible expressions of fellowship. But we also get a scene, quite early on, where Fiennes' Kelson can be seen teaching zombie alpha Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) to dance to the strains of Duran Duran's "Ordinary World". This embrace of the other counts double when set against the self-serving Jimmies, revealed in the course of the film as pure Reform UK: a pyramid scheme or other passing fad for those who've responded to the carnage of the 21st century with misremembered, misapplied nostalgia - or some desperate need to belong. At best, they're a roaming Facebook group called something like Better Days or Simpler Times; at their worst, they're a murderous personality cult with especially bad teeth. Garland and DaCosta view them as disruptors in the sense the locals in Straw Dogs or the January 6th rioters were disruptors: opportunistic foxes impelled to storm the collective henhouse. You wouldn't, and shouldn't, trust your children with them.

Around them, two things quickly become apparent. One, that DaCosta has been given far greater encouragement by her producers to go for it than she ever received in the making of her striking yet visibly bowdlerised Candyman: the new film still lands among us with an 18 certificate, and the BBFC in its current iteration tends not to give those ratings away like sweeties. Two, that Fiennes - rejoined at the nothing-to-lose, no-fucks-given stage of his career, where he's likely to take a gamble on this as he is to do the cosy new Alan Bennett - knows exactly what he's doing and how to play this particular role. (This may, in fact, be the current awards season's foremost instance of an actor understanding the assignment.) His character still looks like Brando's Colonel Kurtz - shaven of head, daubed in orangey iodine that gives him the appearance of blood on his hands (and elsewhere) - but he acts much as an Ian Kelson would: an ordinary man in extraordinary times, doing his best to cling onto his bedside manner in the face of naked barbarism, trying to get his head around that which has been lost and merits commemoration. The central dramatic clash in the new film is really one of memory, about what we remember of the past and how accurately we remember it: when Fiennes talks about the unshakeable foundations of the old world, you feel it deep in your own bones. Dr. Kelson's first encounter with Lord Sir Jimmy is as much gentle analysis and diagnosis as it is confrontation or collision of worldviews: it's a scene I don't think we've seen in a zombie film before. His second is pure theatre, and a scene that has to be seen to be believed. This continues to be a very odd franchise, operating some way beyond the studios' usual parameters, but it's also been unusually consistent in its delivery of imaginative, muscular genre cinema - and a rare example of the movies meeting and reflecting this very odd, often outright berserker moment.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of January 9-11, 2025):

1 (2) The Housemaid (15)

2 (new) Hamnet (12A) **

3 (1) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12A) ***

4 (3) Marty Supreme (15) ***

5 (4) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

6 (5) The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants (PG) ***

7 (6) Anaconda (12A)

8 (7) Song Sung Blue (12A)

9 (new) Giant (15) **

10 (re) Labyrinth (U) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Blue Velvet

2. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

3. Labyrinth

4. Happy Feet

5. Marty Supreme

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Wicked: For Good (PG)

2 (new) Predator: Badlands (12) **

3 (new) Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (15)

4 (2) Dracula (15)

5 (14) 28 Years Later (15) ****

6 (4) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

7 (3) The Ballad of Wallis Island (12) ***

8 (8) Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (PG)

9 (5) Jurassic World: Rebirth (12) **

10 (6) Sinners (15) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Roofman

2. Sketch

3. I Swear

4. The Smashing Machine

5. Memoir of a Snail

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Schindler's List (Sunday, BBC Two, 10pm)

2. The Piano (Tuesday, BBC Two, 12midnight)

3. The Souvenir (Monday, BBC Two, 11pm)

4. The Souvenir: Part II (Monday, BBC Two, 12.55am)

5. Miami Vice [above] (Saturday, BBC One, 12.15am)

On demand: "Labour of Love/Asha Jaoar Majhe"

The question posed by 2014's mesmerising indie Labour of Love/Asha Jaoar Majhe - and it's one which isn't answered until quite late on in proceedings - is what kind of love story the writer/director Aditya Vikram Sengupta is telling. Initially, we're watching two silent Calcutta residents go about their daily business. A woman in a resplendent sari (Basabdatta Chatterjee) takes a tram and then a bus across town to start work in her factory job, packing designer handbags; meanwhile, a somewhat indolent-seeming man (Ritwick Chakraborty) relaxes into his apparently abundant spare time. (No sooner has he got up than it's time for another nap.) The camera, for its part, keeps having its head turned by the faded beauty of recession-hit 21st century Calcutta: the rattling public transport, the paint-chipped, soot-blackened buildings, the messy life of the city's marketplaces, here set against the shirts drying pristinely on its washing lines and the slate-grey, smogged-over skies. What's entering the film's ears, in the absence of any conventional dialogue, is pure sound design: those trams, the birds, the swelling marches protesting the high cost of living, the bells on the necks of the livestock that still have occasion to be shepherded through these streets.

Sengupta has almost certainly been studying the slow cinema: his eye habitually scans these frames for anything that might be of interest, or spark visual pleasure. A striking staircase; a cat lazing in the mid-afternoon heat; an especially roseate sun going down. Evening brings with it constellations of streetlights and power lines. Time seems to pause altogether, maybe even goes into reverse in places. Is this the Calcutta of 2014, or the Calcutta of Ray's day, or something less concrete than conceptual: some eternal Calcutta? One thing's for sure: this is the work of a director keen to pump the brakes on the frantic accelerationism of today's India in favour of drinking it all in, possibly while getting a little drunk on his own intoxicating imagery. A subsequent film of Sengupta's, 2021's Once Upon a Time in Calcutta, staggered around with a murderously bad head, but here, at least, the filmmaker remained clear-eyed in what he could achieve with all this craft: an idea of the rhythms of the working day, some feel for the mysteries of the city, those areas that remain off-limits to more narrative features, and a broader compendium of gestures that speak multitudes. (The most gorgeous of these are food-related: one character refills spice jars and the screen simultaneously, while a meal is prepared in the kind of ravishing close-ups typically deployed in adland.) This is, finally, a labour of love - small tasks carried out with immense care, and in such a way as to mean so much - but it's also a transportation, a great modern city symphony, and one of those films that defies movie physics: it runs 81 minutes, but generates a near-complete, immaculately balanced and weighted picture of what it is to live, work and indeed love in this particular metropolis.

Labour of Love is available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube.

On demand: "Humans in the Loop"

They're teaching more than Satyajit Ray and Raj Kapoor in the film schools of India. The brisk and intriguing indie parable Humans in the Loop combines elements of Ken Loach and Koyaanisqatsi with something else entirely - and it's that something else that is perhaps the most intriguing element of all. Writer-director Aranya Sahay takes 75 minutes of your time to set up and partially resolve a most complicated situation, namely that of Nehma (Sonal Madhushankar), a working mother from a lower-caste background obliged to take a job so as to secure custody of her children after separating from her husband. This would be a complicated situation in itself, but Sahay goes on to make it more complex still. The job Nehma takes involves data labelling at one of India's nascent AI hubs, a career choice presented as a possible future, but also a curious and uncertain one. Her workplace alone sparks some degree of cognitive dissonance, for this is not some gleaming, billion-dollar, architect-designed tech palace - I'm assuming Sahay didn't have the budget to build one, and would have struggled to secure the permits required to shoot at a pre-existing one - but what looks like a creaky old community centre, hastily refitted with clacky PCs; this makeshift Internet cafe is overseen by a no-nonsense matron (Gita Guha) whom you'd more typically expect to find running a church bridge night. Even before we check in with the boys at head office, you catch an air of desperation, and get a sense Nehma has been enlisted to help give human secrets away on the cheap.

Within this brave new world, our heroine is trying to raise three children at once: an adorable toddler we witness taking his first steps, an older daughter-slash-babysitter who comes to resent her mother's absence from the family home, and the stumbling, demanding, soon to be rampaging beast encoded in the machine, guzzling up human resources and knowledge alike. Like its heroine, it's a film that finds itself occupying two distinct locations simultaneously. Nehma's village offers easy access to symbolic porcupines and elephants; the more driven city fosters virtual escapism by scanning and harvesting the real world. Passing back and forth between the two generates new forms of conflict. On a nature walk, Nehma identifies a leaf-eating worm, useful within nature, which she later learns the technology intends to eradicate; the broad-brush approach to data collation deployed by her employers to get this tech up, running and profitable doesn't allow for nuance or opt-outs, and may yet enable more destruction. Sahay is one of the few contemporary filmmakers who appears entirely comfortable with integrating this tech into their dramas. More so than your correspondent, who firmly believes data centres like these should be bulldozed and salted over, Sahay retains some sympathy for AI as a concept: he has to, to make his drama work, and in return it yields a whole new set of ideas and images for him to play with. Yet he also sees AI's flaws and biases, the many risks it poses, and Humans ultimately extends a far greater sympathy to those of us having to work through and deal with the consequences of all this shiny new kit, aware that people retain a capacity for wonder - and doubt, and fear - which machines really don't. Sahay evidently has those qualities in spades; his film, both eminently timely and naggingly persuasive, does too.

Humans in the Loop is now streaming via Netflix.

On demand: "A River Runs Through It"

1992's A River Runs Through It stands as a strong contender for the most handsome film of the Nineties, shot by Philippe Rousselot under the eye of director Robert Redford, and blessed with the young Brad Pitt before the camera, cutting a dash in fine period tailoring. The material is unusual, to say the least: Redford and screenwriter Richard Friedenberg here adapt the academic Norman Maclean's memoir of growing up in rural Montana in the first decades of the 20th century, when the author was caught between, on one hand, the traditions of the church (represented onscreen by Presbyterian preacher father Tom Skerritt, typically terrific) and a swelling passion for flyfishing, presented as an Edenic state of innocence, a suspension of time that gets lost as the years roll on. Craig Sheffer - the Josh Brolin of his day - is Maclean; Pitt his younger, more impulsive and distractible brother Paul; and Emily Lloyd, ascending to Hollywood in the wake of Wish You Were Here, flashes her stocking tops as the flapper who catches the brothers' eyes. Redford himself provides the narration as the older, wiser Norman, suggesting a filmmaker who's fallen head over heels in love with an aspect of this world, formalising his affection for and fascination with an America he was personally too young to have known.

With Maclean (who'd died two years earlier) as his guide, Redford undertakes to recreate and thereby describe a particular, all but disappeared way of American life. There's naturally a certain nostalgia in play: long afternoons with nothing to do save read poetry, write love letters and repair to the nearest riverbank, a church social that involves thick jam sandwiches and banjo-picking. Yet Redford also notes the prejudice levelled at those indigenous folk who come into these golden boys' lives, and a sense (not quite Lynchian, but heading down a similar path) of a dead-end darkness lying around the mountains and beyond the endless cornfields. Not everyone here will get out alive. It's the work of Redford the nature boy (the fishing sequences are ravishing, but even the regulation set-ups have a breeziness and light that banishes anything too stuffy) and Redford the liberal, of Redford the sometime Gatsby and the Redford who made Ordinary People: nobody else would have landed on this material, nobody else would have fallen quite this hard for it, and nobody else would have filmed it this doggedly. If it remains fundamentally episodic - a slightly shapeless patchwork of moods and tones, old-man memories that likely cohered better on the page - it still rings very true on brotherhood and the unknowability of those closest to us, and it leaves behind intriguing questions as well as a warm, fuzzy afterglow. There's much to be said for dancing in the river of life - especially if you do it in the magic hour.

A River Runs Through It is now streaming via Prime Video and the BFI Player.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of January 2-4, 2025):

1 (1) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12A) ***

2 (2) The Housemaid (15)

3 (5) Marty Supreme (15) ***

4 (4) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

5 (3) The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants (PG) ***

6 (6) Anaconda (12A)

7 (new) Song Sung Blue (12A)

8 (7) Wicked: For Good (PG)

9 (new) Back to the Past (15)

10 (9) Sentimental Value (15) **

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Blue Velvet

2. Labyrinth [above]

3. Happy Feet

4. Marty Supreme

5. Sarvam Maya

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Wicked: For Good (PG)

2 (3) Dracula (15)

3 (re) The Ballad of Wallis Island (12) ***

4 (8) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

5 (6) Jurassic World: Rebirth (12) **

6 (11) Sinners (15) ****

7 (13) A Minecraft Movie (PG)

8 (5) Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (PG)

9 (16) How To Train Your Dragon (PG)

10 (12) Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (12) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. I Swear

2. Memoir of a Snail

3. The Long Walk

4. The Shrouds

5. The Ballad of Wallis Island

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. A Few Good Men (Saturday, Channel 4, 10.35pm)

2. 12 Years a Slave (Sunday, Channel 4, 1am)

3. Top Gun: Maverick (Saturday, Channel 4, 8pm)

4. The Duke (Tuesday, BBC Two, 11pm)

5. 28 Days Later (Tuesday, BBC One, 11.40pm)

Topsy-turvy: "Hamnet"

Is there anything new to be done with the Bard? We've already seen Shakespeare in Love and Shakespeare in his dotage (2018's Branagh-driven All is True) and Shakespeare in a perpetual midlife strop (Ben Elton's BBC sitcom Upstart Crow, with David Mitchell in the lead). With Hamnet, her adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's novel, sometime Oscar winner Chloe Zhao offers us the sight of Shakespeare in grief - and attempting to alchemise his loss into enduring art. He is also, in this telling, a young Shakespeare and a notionally sexy Shakespeare (he's played by Paul Mescal, so individual mileage may vary), and you can't quite shake the suspicion that Zhao, herself trying to recover after the post-Nomadland turbulence of Marvel's The Eternals, must have pitched the project as some kind of Shakespeare origin story, as if the playwright were another Peter Parker. We join this Bard in his twenties, teaching Latin to his neighbours' children so as to pay off his glover father's debts; while there, he bumps into girl-next-door Agnes "Anne" Hathaway (Jessie Buckley). They have it off on a table in the pantry (sexy Shakespeare!), she inspires Romeo and Juliet, they wed, they have several kids, only for several of them to die either in childbirth or infancy, one son lending (a version of) his name to one of the writer's best known plays. Set against the playful, knowing, self-aware Shakespeare of the texts mentioned above, this is plainly serious Shakespeare, sober Shakespeare, sensible Shakespeare, simplified Shakespeare - and here, I'm afraid, is where Hamnet's problems begin.

What O'Farrell and Zhao intend to commemorate here is a period in their august subject's life where the natural order was comprehensively overturned, resulting in a father burying his son. Yet this seems to have been the case creatively, too: in most respects, Hamnet is the image of the dourly po-faced Hollywood history that would normally inspire ribald sending up in shows much like Upstart Crow. Certain scenes border on the ridiculous, many of them rooted in the conception of Agnes as some straggle-haired nature girl. Doubtless O'Farrell did her fair share of research into the limitations of 16th century midwifery in the course of writing the novel, but Zhao has her heroine giving birth alone in the forest with a mighty roar, and then - after a tasteful fade to black - reappearing with babe in arms, nary a tousled forelock out of place on either. Zhao's tendency to prettify everything is, I guess, a contrast to the ugliness of so much shot-on-digital fare, which may be one reason Hamnet has seduced as many awards voters as it has: if you're just in the market for sundappled English woodland, there's plenty of that here. But more often than not the prettification is misapplied, erodes credibility, invites snickering. Hamnet certainly has a Young Star Problem, in that the leads aren't remotely believable as historical figures: they're well-moisturised, gym-hardened young adults who've been invited to dress up on a school awayday to Stratford. The minibus is parked just off-camera throughout. (The one player who seems lived-in to any degree is Joe Alwyn as Buckley's brother, and that may only be because he courted Taylor Swift.)

In the absence of internally generated insights, this script keeps trying to impose 21st century psychology from without. Smacked around by a brutish dad, Will worries what kind of father he's going to be; after Hamnet's death, he starts work on a text about dads and lads (and ghosts). This really is Shakespeare for dummies: aha!, we're meant to go, so that explains that! (Toss all Shakespeare's writings off a cliff, and let's never think of him or his plays again.) Such persistent neatness is in conflict with the complexity and ambiguity that have kept folks coming back to this playwright over the years; worse still, it makes for punishingly flat and prosaic drama. Towards the end of its third series, Upstart Crow itself tackled Hamnet's death in a way that proved unexpectedly affecting, earning its emotion through good writing and playing. Zhao, by contrast, insists on having Buckley wail like a banshee every twenty minutes, recycles well-used Max Richterisms that signify this is A Serious Film, and concludes with a very silly scene in the Globe where Agnes, agog, has the experiences of the previous two hours reflected back to her through the medium of mummery. Aha, so that's what art does! (Toss all art off a cliff.) That Hamnet has occupied the place it has in the awards conversation may be down to slim end-of-year pickings - two consensus choices (One Battle After Another and Sinners) and then whatever you can cobble together - and/or that it's the sort of thing that has traditionally grabbed votes, nods and gongs: keywords Shakespeare, period drama, British craft credits, trauma. It struck this observer as an obligation nomination, phoney art, and - most bizarrely - a tale told far more rigorously in a lowly sitcom, surrounded by knob gags.

Hamnet is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

"Giant" (Little White Lies Jan/Feb 2026)

It’s nearing a quarter-century since the retirement of “Prince” Naseem Hamed, Sheffield’s world champion boxer of Yemeni heritage. For a while, in the run-up to the new millennium, he was everywhere: transcending the sports section to provide primetime entertainment and front-page news, bolstering his swelling celebrity with both combative talent (career record: 36 wins, only one loss) and a showman swagger that fitted the shameless Nineties to a tee. What the Gallagher brothers were to the festival stage, so Hamed was to the boxing ring. Just as Oasis are back among us, so too is Prince Naz – albeit in the form of the Sly Stallone-produced biopic Giant, written and directed by Gangs of London’s Rowan Athale, which forces the boxer’s story through the Britfilm cookie cutter and barely stays on its feet.

Athale begins in the early 1980s, where Irish trainer and occasional youth club DJ Brendan Ingle (Pierce Brosnan, introduced gyrating to The Sweet’s “Blockbuster”) takes delivery of the three young Hamed brothers from a mother concerned by the skinheads circling the family’s cornershop. Training montages ensue, as the diminutive, dancing Naseem (played by Ghaith and Ali Saleh as a child, and by Limbo’s Amir El-Masry as a young man) outpunches his siblings and starts to climb the Yorkshire boxing ladder. Shot around Sheffield itself, these scrappy early scenes sketch a haphazard spit-and-sawdust circuit, prompting chuckles from the increasingly exasperated relationship between no-nonsense trainer and a fighter who’d rather hang round the arcade trying to impress girls.

Yet one soon realises this story has been afforded much the same kid-gloves handling as the Eddie the Eagle and Elton John biopics. (Even before Toby Stephens turns up, effing and jeffing as the film’s sitcom idea of promoter Frank Warren.) Prejudice may lurk in these hills – schoolboy P-words, flat-out xenophobia from the man on the Sheffield omnibus – but the nation’s soap operas have had more nuanced and dramatically rewarding things to say about race. That conflict is eventually sublimated into a boxer-trainer squabble over purse money that plays as both contrived and phony. Worse: amid a fumbled final reel, Giant starts to insinuate that it’s really here to promote the Irishman Ingle over his sulky, money-grubbing charge. Initially cartoonish, it ends up deeply compromised and confused.

With the budget depriving Athale of his usual streaming-telly pyrotechnics, the look is forever closer to Mansfield than Madison Square Garden. The leads, at least, give individual scenes a little character. The more we see of him, the more El-Masry resembles Hamed, whether chomping choc ices in training or puffing out his chest on a mock-up TFI Friday. And there are the minor pleasures of watching Brosnan in his new, relaxed late period, letting his accent meander even as he passes the ultimate test of any movie trainer: you’d want someone this amiable in your corner. The material, however, throws in the towel long before the bathetic finale; the inevitable post-fadeout footage of the real Hamed in his dynamic prime is a hundred times more stirring than anything preceding it. 

Anticipation: At least it’s not a musical biopic – and this is a worthy story 3

Enjoyment: Two game leads fight a losing battle with punch-drunk, flyweight writing 2

In retrospect: Never a contender 1

Giant opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.

In memoriam: Béla Tarr (Telegraph 07/01/26)

Béla Tarr, who has died aged 70, was a Hungarian writer-director whose immersive, durational oeuvre anticipated the so-called “slow cinema” movement and yielded one of the towering masterworks of late 20th century film.

The film was Sátántangó (1994), a seven-and-a-quarter hour adaptation of László Krasznahorkai’s 1985 novel about a superstitious rural community thrown into turmoil by the arrival of a mystic poet. Shot in monochrome on the Great Plains over the course of two years, it matched Krasznahorkai’s long-running sentences with extended, unbroken takes, starting with an eight-minute prologue observing cattle swarming across a market square and through the muddy backroads of its woebegone setting.

Comprising 150 shots in total, often stalking hunched figures trudging down wind-tossed lanes, the film used the extra time to better define the parameters of a place and the vulnerabilities of a people swayed by the false prophet in their midst. In passing, Tarr’s camera caught microclimates, shifting affections and suspicions, and memorably – often hellishly – boozy nights at the village pub, but these were details within the bigger picture of lives going nowhere, and people marching headlong into existential dead ends.

The effect was strikingly lugubrious, prompting understandable concern for the real-life safety of a cat seen being tortured at one point. (Tarr insisted the scene was performed under veterinary supervision, and wondered why we weren’t more concerned about the two-legged participants.) Yet the engulfing darkness was frequently illuminated by droll flashes of wit, like the fate of the bibulous doctor (played by Peter Berling) who staggers out to replenish his pear brandy reserves in the film’s opening movement.

Upon first release, the consensus was that there had been nothing quite like it – and certainly few book-to-film adaptations that felt so complete. The debate was how a film that looked so conspicuously out of time spoke to the pre-millennial moment. Sátántangó was only funded after the collapse of Communist rule in Hungary, its underpinning narrative speaking to the curious spell fearmongering demagogues can cast on an especially credulous populace.

Some observers embraced the film as an alternative to the then-dominant Hollywood norm; there was a cosmic irony in the fact a film so doggedly pursuing its own path at its own pace should emerge in the same year as Jan de Bont’s relentless thriller Speed (1994). For his part, Tarr insisted the film should speak for itself: “When we are making a movie, we only talk about concrete situations – where the camera is, what will be the first and the last shot. We never talk about art or God."

The critics filled that void, astonished to discover the medium could still produce something so challenging and absorbing at the same time. Susan Sontag famously declared Sátántangó “enthralling for every minute”, adding she “could watch [it] every year for the rest of her life”. Digitally restored and rereleased to mark its 25th anniversary in 2019, it remained a mountain among movies, the K2 of cinema.

The attenuated nature of a Tarr production – the long, exacting shoots and shots – meant that follow-ups were never immediate, and then few and far between. These depended on the firm bonds connecting the director to a handful of fellow travellers, including Krasznahorkai, the composer and accordionist Mihály Víg (who played the poet in Sátántangó), the cinematographer Fred Kelemen, and the editor Ágnes Hranitzky, whom Tarr married in the early 1980s. As Tarr put it: “I was just the conductor, I put them all together.”

There was nothing quite as monumental as the breakthrough film, but several times Tarr came close to matching its impact. Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) – a slip of a film at two hours 25 minutes, composed of just 39 shots – was in the director’s own words “a kind of fairy tale” adapted from Krasznahorkai’s 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance. Dreamier and airier than its grounded predecessor, it nevertheless built towards the despairing widescreen image of a rotting whale carcass abandoned on a beach.

The Man from London (2007) signalled Tarr’s growing status within the cinematic and festival ecosystem. A deadpan thriller, adapted from the Georges Simenon novel and fashioned with overseas money, it even featured a recognisable face in the ever-adventurous Tilda Swinton, cast as the railwayman protagonist’s wife.

Tarr bade farewell to cinema with The Turin Horse (2011), composed in just 30 shots running an average of six minutes apiece. A pessimistic riff on the anecdote that sparked Nietzsche’s mental breakdown, the film described the relationship between a father and daughter living a miserly existence in a shack at the end of the world. Here, Tarr pushed his already demanding aesthetic to a new extreme: after some opening narration, no dialogue could be heard for a further 22 minutes.

By now, critics had got a firmer handle on the Tarr approach. In his New York Times review, A.O. Scott wrote: “The movie is too beautiful to be described as an ordeal, but it is sufficiently intense and unyielding that when it is over you may feel, along with awe, a measure of relief.”

Tarr, however, knew that this was exactly what distinguished his cinema from the forgettable pablum passing through the multiplexes: “Most films just tell the story: action, fact, action, fact... For me, this is poisoning the cinema because the art form is pictures written in time. It’s not only a question of length, it’s a question of heaviness. It’s a question of can you shake the people or not?”

Béla Tarr was born on July 21, 1955 in the city of Pécs, but raised in Budapest by parents steeped in theatre: his father designed scenery, while his mother worked as a prompter. He briefly found employment as a child actor after his mother took him to auditions for Hungarian state television; he was cast as the protagonist’s son in a TV adaptation of The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1965).

He had youthful hopes of becoming a philosopher, and initially regarded filmmaking as no more than a hobby, supported by the 8mm camera his parents gifted him for his fourteenth birthday. Plans to attend film school were scuppered after the authorities got wind of his short films, unvarnished non-fiction studies of the country’s poor and working-class. Yet these shorts also drew more sympathetic attention from the administrators of the Béla Balázs Studio, set up in 1959 to assist young artists, and they provided the funding for Tarr to make his feature debut.

Shot in six days, Family Nest (1979) was a claustrophobic example of socialist realism, its narrative enabling a scratchily fictionalised critique of prevailing housing policy. The film shared the Grand Prize at the Mannheim-Heidelberg Film Festival, and also won grudging respect from the authorities, who belatedly removed Tarr from the film-school blacklist. Tarr followed it with The Outsider (1981), set amongst Budapest’s hedonistic youth.

By Tarr’s own admission, these were in many ways reactive works, but they also demonstrated a growing commitment to pressing issues and marginalised contemporaries: “There were a lot of s**t things in the cinema, a lot of lies. We weren’t knocking at the door, we just beat it down. We were coming with some fresh, new, true, real things. We just wanted to show the reality – anti-movies."

His signature style began to coalesce while filming a TV adaptation of Macbeth (1982) that compressed the play’s action into two extended takes – a five-minute prologue, and a second that lasted just over an hour. Thereafter Tarr’s work became more expressively experimental. Almanac of Fall (1984), a rare diversion into colour, was a doomy character piece set within a tumbledown apartment block; Damnation (1988) was a rain-lashed noir entangling a singer and a barfly. (It received a belated UK release in the wake of Sátántangó.)

Tarr’s influence grew exponentially thereafter: by the first years of the new century, Gus van Sant was crediting him as inspiration for his funny-peculiar Matt Damon/Casey Affleck walkabout Gerry (2002). In 2012, he was elected president of the Association of Hungarian Film Artists; the following year, he opened his own guerrilla film school, known as film.factory, in Sarajevo, operating with the motto “no education, just liberation”. (He served as executive producer on Lamb (2021), a fabular horror directed by film.factory graduate Valdimar Jóhannsson.)

He was the subject of the documentary I Used To Be A Filmmaker (2016), and a 2017 retrospective, Till the End of the World, at Amsterdam’s EYE Filmmuseum. He made a comeback in 2019, overseeing the performance piece Missing People for Vienna’s Festwochen festival, made in response to a new Hungarian law that criminalised the homeless. According to Tarr, who elsewhere labelled the populist Orbán regime as “the shame of our country”, the piece reflected “capitalism and the inhuman system that we have. If you’re not productive, you’re out.”

The reissue of Sátántangó that year provided a rallying cause for those who’d long wished the cinema could develop beyond the usual blandishments and platitudes. As Tarr put it, in characteristically irascible fashion: “People just tell a f**ing story and we believe that something is happening with us. But nothing is happening with us. We are not really part of the story. We are just doing our time, and nobody gives a s**t about what time is doing to us. It’s a huge mistake. I just did it a different way.”

He is survived by Ágnes Hranitzky.

Béla Tarr, born July 21, 1955, died January 6, 2026.